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< Piro >

It's been a bit of a chaotic start for this year. Not crazy insane chaos like last year, but a lot of [screams externally] frustration and wading through fields of ugh. Yes, I've been in the ER twice in the past two months, but I came out doing just fine (until i get the bills at least ^^;;) and other than that the chaos i'm speaking of has been mostly churn. I have a lot of goals for this year and dammit, I'm gonna reach some of them because i'm due a little time to battle MY chaoses.

One of my goals for this year is to significantly increase Megatokyo comic output. There, I said it. Comics generally take about three to four days to produce. If the time doing this gets broken up (as has been happening a lot lately) it can take even longer. On average, I've been releasing two comics per month. That's not enough. This needs to change.

I want to have a better running flow of comics for readers to enjoy. I want to have more comics going for ME to enjoy. I want to finish this chapter so I can release Megatokyo Volume 7. This chapter is really just starting to get interesting and I am keen to see where it goes.

So, with it taking three to four days to produce a comic why has that meant only two comics per month? That's only eight days right? Surely I can fit in another three or four days for another comic? Well, for one thing I have a chunk of time every month (a week or more) I devote to work on the Megatokyo Visual Novel project (which I've been trying and failing to keep from becoming a 'redraw Megatokyo entirely from the beginning'). If anything, i'd like to increase this time so I can make quicker progress toward our next milestone.

The other activity that has been taking up a lot of time are non-comic Megatokyo illustrations. Why have I been putting so much time into these? Because it has been one of the primary ways i've been supporting myself in recent years. I have a section in the MegaGear store devoted to the sale of original art, from comic panels to stand alone illustrations. The simple fact is that fully rendered and drawn non-comic illustrations, especially color, sell better than regular comic panels. There is nothing strange about this, comic panels rely on adjacent drawings to form a whole and rarely stand alone well. So, when trying to earn monies to pay bills you try to produce work that you are fairly certain people might actually buy. While this has resulted in a large and robust gallery of full color Megatokyo illustrations there have been many times where I had to put aside working on the next Megatokyo comic to work on drawings for the store.

Oddly enough, the writing, drawing and creation of comic pages has always been the one thing in Megatokyo that does not directly support itself. Comics don't tend to earn anything until they are collected into print volumes, and as you might guess this is often not until years later. I can keep rolling along this way (I do love doing the illustrations - a lot of them have been very interesting and honestly inspired a lot of story development work) but if I want to produce more comics, this is where that time needs to come from.

This is where my new Patreon comes in. My goal with Patreon is to give Megatokyo readers the ability to support the creation of comic pages directly, reducing my need to do non-comic illustrations all the time. The comic itself won't change, it will always be a free to read webcomic. The only difference is that Patreon supporters will get a chance to see the comic 24hrs before everyone else. Another perk that supporters will get is something I have not often released - high resolution versions of finished comics. A lot of the detail I obsessively draw into the comics tends to get lost in the web-sized versions. I actually posted a new Megatokyo comic to the Patreon last night and will be posting it here later this evening.

I think i'll also try ranting more this year. Because, y'know, ranting and raving, sorta part of the process. :) Thank you for your support and for reading Megatokyo. I want to make Megatokyo not only worth reading (which it still kinda is) but worth *following* and reading regularly too. Regardless of how the Patreon does, I plan on trying to do this anyway. Your support can just help make it more feasible. :) Thank you.

And now to get to work on the next comic, which like always you can watch on my Twitch channelwhen I'm at my desk working. I typically broadcast just about every day, usually in the evenings. Oh, I'm a partner on Twitch and you are welcome to subscribe to my channel where you can use any of my Cute Megatokyo Girls with Small Heads emotes in your Twitch chatter (which also supports Megatokyo if you prefer that to Patreon :).

Thank you for your support over these last two years. I wouldn’t be able to keep going without everyone!

This particular book came together during some pretty rough moments of personal drama, which didn't help the pressure I put on myself to get it just right, and what contributed heavily to why it dropped a month later than my general goal of two books a year. The desire to get it just right is especially important to me because now we finally are going to start getting into the meat of the Endgames story.

While Tower of Kartage kinda set the mechanics of how the world works, and Dire Water and Fire Fox kinda gave us a bird's eye view of the world itself and the events that take place, now we're finally going to see a more ground level perspective, specifically of the adventuring days of Pirogoeth's life that up until now had only been hinted at. This is really digging into actual canon events of the entire MT world, and I won't deny being absolutely petrified at times that I will not present it in a quality fashion.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. I hope you enjoy it, and are ready to dig in further while I get Book 5, The Great Underground Empire, ready!